Manning Up

Men Are Now Boys: Why We Rebelled Against The System

Boys went to school thinking they were going on a journey to the top jobs, goes the theory, and what they got instead was a girl-powered campus and labor market. They have rebelled by pledging themselves to the Guy Code

This is an excerpt from Manning Up, by Kay Hymowitz.

Globalization, improved productivity, and a digital revolution propelled a massive shift in the economy, away from manufacturing to knowledge and services—to women’s greatadvantage. “The post-industrial economy is indifferent to men’ssize and strength,” explains Hanna Rosin in her popular article“The End of Men.” Young men are not showing the samefocus or resilience that supervisors and professors notice amongwomen. This is not the case for all men by any means. Plenty ofguys graduate college with a résumé to rival or surpass the mostenterprising alpha girls. But there is a large and prominent groupof men who hit their twenties and seem unsure what’s expectedof them....Men have been strugglingwith finding an acceptable adult male identity since at least themid-nineteenth century. We often hear about the miseries ofwomen confined to the domestic sphere once men began to workin offices and factories away from home. It seems that men didn’tmuch like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy proprietyof the bourgeois parlor as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies andadventures, such as hunting and fishing....The arrival in the 1950s of Playboy seemedlike the ultimate protest against male domestication—think ofthe refusal of adult manhood implied by the title alone.The playboy was a prologue for the contemporary child-manin his disregard for domestic life....By the 2000s, young menwere tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, theCartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescentmale preferences of its targeted male audiences. Theywatched movies with such overgrown boy actors as Steve Carrell,Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell,and Seth Rogen, the star of the aforementioned Knocked Up, andcheered their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotchshots, explosions, beer pong competitions, and other frat-boypranks. ...Commentators most commonly describe these juvenile pre -dilections as evidence of a media-inspired backlash against feminism.Boys went to school thinking they were going on a journeyto the top jobs, goes the theory, and what they got instead was agirl-powered campus and labor market. They have rebelled bypledging themselves to the Guy Code—the term comes from thesociologist Michael Kimmel—treating women as objects of hormonalrevenge and making “you’re-so-gay” quips with their bros.More likely, the child-man is a reaction to a widespread culturaluncertainty about men, an uncertainty considerably aggravated by preadulthood. It’s been an almost universal rule of civilization thatwhereas girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity,boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physicalprowess, or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors of women and children; thiswas always their primary social role. Today, however, with womenmoving ahead in an advanced economy, provider husbands andfathers are now optional, and the character qualities men hadneeded to play their role—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete and even a little embarrassing.

This makes the preadult man something like an actor in adrama in which he only knows what he shouldn’t say. He hasto compete in a fierce job market but can’t act too bossy or selfconfident.He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart butnot cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, hisadvisers and confidants are generally undomesticated dudes justlike him. Single men have never been civilization’s most responsibleactors; they continue to be more troubled and less successfulthan men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers.If, without an adult male playbook, some of them live inrooms decorated with Star Wars posters and crushed beer cansand treat women like disposable estrogen toys, well, we can bedisgusted, but we shouldn’t be surprised.

Kay Hymowitz's new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, just came out in paperback and is available here.